Before coming into this class, I had experience with game design and development. I had the opportunity of publishing my game, YuMe, in collaboration with Google Play a few years ago.
I also had experience with Unity, 3D modeling, and VR game development!
Since I had created a couple of games from start to finish, a part of me felt like I already knew the process for creating games. Although I had practical experience, I don’t think I truly understood how to design a good game.
One thing I always struggle with is the perfectionist mindset. I always feel like my ideas have to be completely original or that I can only show others the final product of my work when I feel like it is complete and I am satisfied with it. Because of this, I am usually hesitant when it comes to receiving feedback, especially when I know there are things that I would change. Even though I know it isn’t a healthy mindset, I can’t help but stick to it. I think one of the reasons I loved this class was because of how much of an emphasis there was on playtesting and documenting that process. Feedback wasn’t seen as a negative thing, and it was so amazing to see how much better our game became just from hearing a player’s feedback. I also learned how hard it is to make a good judgment about your own work, so it makes it all the more important to reach out to others and use feedback to your advantage! In past games, I worked in a very linear fashion that went straight from the design to the final product. If there were things I realized didn’t work, it would be hard to go back and make changes because everything was mostly fleshed out already. Using this technique of frequent testing, I really want to improve my game designs in the future!
I also think this idea of satisfactory over perfect was reinforced not just in the actual game design portion of class, but also with the assignments and guest speakers. I really enjoyed the talk by Denise Jacobs about this, and loved the fact that assignments were given an A as long as something was submitted. Even on a regular basis, I find myself wasting time on smaller things in attempt to put my absolute best foot forward, but I’m realizing that I need to let go sometimes and just start!
One other thing I really appreciated about the class (which Christina mentioned a lot) were the people! There were so many different people in the class, and I never felt out of place. I am very used to feeling like I am not a “gamer” because I don’t fit into the stereotype of what a gamer should look like, and because the games I play are not necessarily the classical game types you think about when thinking of hardcore gamers, like FPS. The class really gave me time to explore different game genres through the critical plays, and gave us a very broad range in terms of what type of games we could create, whether it be analog or digital.
One of the ideas that also really stuck with me in class was balance. I realized that no matter how complex or simple the game is, there needs to be a right balance of difficulty and motivation for players to play again. I found that this was more important than other things that I used to place much more importance on, like stunning graphics.
Overall, I really loved this class. It gave me a much better view of how I should go about designing games in the future, and even gave me some invaluable life advice about how to work with other people and myself! I’m really interested in creating some sort of multiplayer game over the summer, and I want to test with friends, family, and classmates as much as possible. Thank you for a great quarter!
